“I could be a help to you,” Aurélie said. “I want to be a help to you.”
Her father put a hand on her shoulder. It was the sort of gesture that would once have made her wiggle like a puppy wagging its tail. “You are a help to me,” he said. “Your work in the village—it keeps the little major in a stew. And as long as he’s looking the wrong way . . . the real work can go on.”
“That’s all I’ve been? A distraction?” She wondered what it was he had done on Christmas Eve, that he had needed to chivy her down to the village, a decoy. She had thought it was because she was his daughter, the lady of the house, carrying on in the fine tradition of the ladies of Courcelles. Because these were her people, too. But, no. She was just a distraction. A pawn.
“Not just a distraction,” said her father, plucking the note from her limp hand. “An excellent distraction. Your friend was the only one with brains enough to have noticed what we’re doing, but you’ve kept him in such a froth, he scarcely remembers his own name.”
He smiled at her approvingly, but Aurélie didn’t feel the warmth of it. Her chest felt tight, as though she’d received a blow.
“We?” she echoed. “What we’re doing?”
“Don’t ask me more,” said her father, as though she were six again and begging for sweets. “The less you know, the safer it is.”
Safer for whom?
Aurélie watched her father go, wondering just what it would take to make him trust her—and if he had ever viewed her as truly his own.
Chapter Eighteen
Daisy
Jardin des Tuileries
Paris, France
July 1942
Madeleine bestrode her horse calmly, but Olivier wouldn’t sit still. He kept turning and pointing as the carousel went around, laughing and straining and almost falling off. Daisy, her nerves shredded, kept starting forward from the bench, but Legrand stopped her.
“You have to trust them,” he said. “You have to let them make mistakes.”
“Easy to say when they’re not your own.”
Legrand removed his hand from her elbow and leaned forward, resting his forearms on his thighs. “That’s true.”
“I’m sorry. That’s not what I meant.”
He twiddled his thumbs for a moment, staring at the carousel as it revolved endlessly before them. The delighted screams of children. Mere yards away, the German staff cars rolled up and down rue de Rivoli, across the Place de la Concorde, ferrying the enemy from café to office to luxury hotel, but here in the Tuileries, in front of the ancient carousel, you could almost pretend that Paris was as it had always been, that the occupation was just a terrible dream. That you were just sitting here on this bench to watch your children play, and that the man beside you was not some agent for the Resistance that you met by arrangement, but your lover, your husband, the father of these children you watched together.
“My parents left me to my own devices, more or less,” said Legrand. “They were both artists.”
“Yes, I remember. Your father was a writer, and your mother a painter.”
“Yes. Well. They were devoted firstly to their creative passions and secondly to each other. Children came a rather distant third.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. We knew they loved us, and we had each other. I learned how to fend for myself, how to get myself out of scrapes. And I never had to strain against the straitjacket of parental expectations, or whatever you want to call it. They allowed us to become pretty much whatever we pleased.”
As he spoke, Daisy stared at his latticed fingers, and the gold of the signet ring that glimmered dully between them. The two swans, necks entwined. She thought of her own childhood within the walls of the Ritz, which had sometimes felt like a playground—if a decidedly adult playground—and other times like a prison.
“Then you were fortunate,” she said. “I grew up always in the shadow of my grandmother. And my mother, who had all my grandmother’s love, so that Grandmère never really forgave me for living when my maman had not. The Demoiselle de Courcelles, the last in a long line of heroic women, whom I could never hope to equal.”
“No, that’s true. You aren’t their equal.”
Daisy looked away.
“You’re not your mother or your grandmother, or any of these ancestors who lived before you. You’re yourself.” Legrand straightened and put his hand on his leg, so that his pinky finger nearly touched the side of her thigh. “You’re Daisy, astonishing and irreplaceable. A formidable woman.”